The following is a simple technical guide to help developers to publish their Android app on Google Play.

Here is what you need :

A Google Play publisher account (which is mainly an Android developper account). You can sign up from here

Android Studio in order to generate your .apk file (the Android Application Package is a package file format used to distribute and install apps on Android)

If you are ready to publish, let’s see how to generate your apk. In Android Studio, access “Build” and then “Build apk” from the top menu :

Your application folder now contains a file called app-debug.apk :

From the command line, change directory to where your app-debug.apk file is located. Once there, we need to generate a key that will help us signing the apk. In the command line terminal, type the following :

The next step is optimizing the apk. The result is having the app use less RAM when running. We’ll use the zipalign tool. It’s usually found under /path/to/Android/sdk/build-tools/VERSION/zipalign. On a mac, it is under ~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/VERSION/zipalign :